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The Early Years series will offer a glimpse into SST’s rich history through interviews with key players in SST’s creation and beginning decades. For the first installment, we spoke with Henry (Hank) Weaver of Goshen, who served on the planning committee for SST.

Hank Weaver’s game was chemistry. It was his love, his research, what he taught at Eastern Mennonite College and Goshen College, and the spark that sent him to Peru in 1964 as a consultant at San Marcos University in Lima. When he returned to Goshen from a year of teaching in very bad Spanish and Lima’s grey humidity, his passion was still chemistry. But now he could not stop thinking about the world.

On cold and snowy Colorado nights, when with the turn of a knob I can have a hot bath, I think of you. On beautiful sunny days when the sky, framed by evergreens and rugged mountains, is a blue you can’t believe until you see it, I think of you. When it rains and the rivers and streams turn to rust from the rocks and hills around them, I think of you, and the red dirt of Zimbabwe. It’s as if the rocks I climb herewash away until they become the dust that coated my feet as I walked the streets of Bulawayo, where you became my mother.

With thanks to Micah Miller-Eshleman, the GC Communications and Marketing Office and the International Education Office.

Goshen College is an affordable, nationally-recognized Christian liberal arts college in Northern Indiana known for leadership in intercultural and international education, sustainability and social justice. Visit goshen.edu.

About Study-Service Term (SST)

Since 1968, more than 7,700 students have lived, learned and served in 24 countries worldwide in Goshen College's nationally-recognized, semester-long study abroad program, which about 80 percent of students participate in. The program emphasizes service to a local community — and total cultural immersion in a developing country. Students live with local families and experience day-to-day life in the most personal way possible.